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Wednesday Sep 22, 2010

Jim Mauro and I recently handed the manuscript for the DTrace book to the publisher, which (unformatted) came in at over 900 pages. It covers using DTrace, complementary to the DTrace Guide, and should serve as a cookbook of DTrace scripts and one-liners for topics spanning the entire software stack. It also contains strategies and checklists for these topics, to help the reader develop scripts further.

The chapters are:

Introduction

The D Language

System View

Disk I/O

Filesystems

Network Lower Level Protocols

Application Level Protocols

Languages

Applications

Databases

Security

Kernel

Tools

Tips and Tricks

The book contains over 230 DTrace scripts and over 270 one-liners, many of which are new, and go much further than I have done previously in the DTraceToolkit.

Our intent was ambitious: this wasn't to be just a cookbook of scripts, but a cookbook of useful scripts and strategy that spanned the entire software stack - covering both easy and difficult topics alike. We wrote up the chapters and subtopics that such a book would ideally cover, and then created the content - much of which didn't exist before.

It's taken most of the past year to develop and write this material - consuming all of my spare time at the expense of many things: blog entries, DTraceToolkit updates, and other personal sacrifices. It's been exhausting at times, but it's also very satisfying to have finally completed. The publisher is now turning this into the finished product, a process which typically takes a few months.